Francis Koch

My paintings act as nomadic processes aimed at questioning an hyper-sedentarized society. They articulate around the sampling of nomadic fragments transposed in the shape of pictorial travel journals, implying a more deeply rooted connection to displacement and the road travelled.

Leaving is bliss in this sedentary world...

Humans are first and foremost beings of movement, nomads from their origin and for the better part of their history. Only recently, as the industrial revolution unfolded, were they required to become growingly settled in order to create a massive consumerist workforce, thus sustaining it's means of production. This revolution having perverted the interaction with movement, mobility is in large part attributed to consumerism and therefore more superficial and static than ever. Despite mass tourism and the ability to travel vast distances easily, this ultimate crystallization of sedentarity is the source of a great social impasse where a connection to the authentic experience is growingly lacking. Aseptization, isolation, quest for security, consumerism and comfort now dictate the western social paradigm.

The great responsibility behind mobility...
In the perspective of countering this new mobility paradigm, my work takes the role of an ethnological manifest to movement by establishing a direct, deep rooted contact to transiency. The end result is a perpetual disposition to departure; a change of perspective maintaining an opened breach within a sedentary time and space. My work ultimately hopes to contribute to shifting the hyper-sedentarized paradigm to a more levelled relationship between nomadic nature and a sedentary lifestyle.